4 ms·
The Abomination of Ebooks: They Price People Out of Reading
- david927 13y agoI have a Kindle and have never paid for a book. There is (sadly) very little in the way of great literature that hasn't had its copyright already expire.
- snogglethorpe 13y ago+1 for that... and you don't even need to go to extra trouble, there's a huge number of free Kindle editions of classic books on Amazon itself (just normal Amazon books with a price of zero), so you can take advantage of Amazon's very convenient infrastructure for finding them and getting them easily onto your Kindle. Often there's a choice too, with some versions of a work free (long out of copyright etc), other versions not (more recent translations, etc), and even the non-free versions of classics often fairly cheap, as they're not recent. ... and of course if you go to a bit more trouble, there's a huge choice from places like Project Gutenberg.
- r0muald 13y agoIt's strange how the author gives for granted that ebooks have DRM, so the piece ends up attacking all ebooks and not DRM (not mentioned at all).
- gte910h 13y agoAnd not all books have DRM. I bought several off amazon recently that state in their description they do not
- jnazario 13y agoi didn't think that was the focus on the piece but rather the collusion in pricing (as found in the anti-trust court decision on this point with apple). while i have a home library that's bursting at the seams, i buy physical books because they're cheaper. if i could get a used ebook for one cent, i would.
- greenyoda 13y agoPosted four days ago (53 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482382 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6482382